Review: Cathay Pacific Business Class Lounge Tokyo Haneda Airport

A Very Asian Conrad Christmas: Trip Planning
Cathay Pacific The Pier Business Class Lounge (HKG)
Cathay Pacific B777 Business Class HKG-HND / HND-HKG
Conrad Tokyo
Cathay Pacific Tokyo Haneda Lounge (HND)
Conrad Macao
Conrad Hong Kong
Cathay Pacific The Pier First Class Lounge (HKG)

At the start of my trip I hadn’t planned on covering the Cathay Pacific Tokyo Haneda lounge. “Just another CX J lounge outside Hong Kong,” I’d thought.

What I hadn’t counted on was that ‘just another CX J lounge’ is pretty darned impressive! Opened in Dec 2014, the lounge was clearly designed with the more recent (re)design aesthetic in mind. Seconds after stepping in, I’d decided that this was going to have to be part of the trip report.

Main area

Brightly lit with floor-to-ceiling windows encasing the lounge, the CX HND lounge offers a large number of seats, often with views of the runway outside.

One thing I really like about CX lounges is the variety of furniture used within each of them – it really breaks the monotony when there’s actual differentiation of areas and the types of seats available within them.

I also enjoyed how, like in The Pier F lounge HKG, power sockets were readily available, yet as the same time cleverly hidden in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

Bureau

In case you don’t have your own computer with you, a mini computer lab equipped with iMacs and printers is available for you to work on. I didn’t really take a close look, but they’re supposed to be configured with dual operating systems, so I guess Windows users would still be able to stick to a familiar interface even while using these.

The Bar

Towards one end of the lounge lies The Bar, offering a range of alcoholic as well as non-alcoholic beverage you can get for yourself.

Food Bar

Towards the other end of the lounge (just before the Noodle Bar) is the Food Bar, essentially a little kiosk offering a range of salads and desserts.

The stuff on offer actually looked pretty good, but I was more in the mood for hot food and proceeded to the Noodle Bar instead.

Noodle bar

Probably my favourite part of the CX lounge experience is going to the noodle bar and ordering my (by now) favourite Dan Dan Noodles.

The Noodle Bar area is pretty large, with different types of seating available, depending (I feel) on whether you value comfortable seating or a view of the runway.

These automatic beer dispensers are pretty common in Japan (I remember seeing them in the ANA and United lounges in NRT as well), but I guess the novelty has yet to wear off on me – still found it pretty fun watching a mug of Kirin Ichiban draft beer being prepared. Gotta love how they specially fill in the foamy head right at the end.

Washrooms

The lounge doesn’t have any showers – I suppose similar to SIN, they don’t expect travellers doing a long layover and actually needing those facilities.

I don’t usually bother documenting lounge washrooms, but I really enjoy their look and feel (and also how alike they are to others elsewhere in the world).

Plus, who doesn’t love those Japanese washlets?

Conclusion

I wasn’t actually expecting too much from a foreign lounge, especially after my awesome experience at The Pier in HKG, but the CX HND lounge managed to surprise me in a very pleasant way. Part of it is probably due to how consistent the ground experience was throughout my own journey experiencing the lounges in SIN (here’s Jeriel’s review), HKG and now HND – the consistency of experience helped to reinforce the positive memories accumulated experiencing each of them.

I’m still not a fan of their regional J product, but man, CX’s ground experience has (almost) got me converted.